Episode Summary

How would you like to cut your work week in half? It’s possible - with the power of time blocking your schedule.

In this episode, Melissa Swink shares a quick guide to leveraging time blocking to increase your productivity as a CEO. She discusses three easy-to-implement strategies for time-blocking your weekly calendar, including scheduling email checks, consolidating availability for meetings, and reserving time for needle movers. She also shares how she shifted her own schedule to massively increase efficiency. Tune in to learn the importance of structuring your day to achieve the results you want, while maintaining balance and focus!

Key Highlights:

• Time blocking can significantly increase productivity and efficiency in a work week.
• Scheduling email checks and consolidating availability for meetings are key strategies for effective time blocking.
• Reserving time for “needle movers” and prioritizing tasks is essential for achieving business growth and maintaining work-life balance.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, I'm going to share my quick guide to leveraging time blocking to get the results that you want. According to an estimate by Todoist, a 40 -hour work week that is time blocked produces the same amount of output.

as an unstructured 60 -hour work week. Time blocking is a free and highly effective productivity tool that is often underutilized, but with a little bit of planning and setup, your work week could become up to 50 % shorter without sacrificing results. And as much as I love swimming and planning and creating dream CEO calendars with my clients, today I'm going to break this down and make it really, really simple and share three

easy to implement strategies for time blocking your weekly calendar. And the first step that I want to share with you today is to schedule your email checks and prep time every day. So when you think about when you get started with work in the morning, what are some of the first things that you need to do? For me, this looks like logging into my email. I do not have work email on my phone. I think I've shared that in the podcast before.

I've just found that I would absentmindedly check it in random times of the day or after I put my daughter to bed at night and I just realized that I was checking work email in times where it wasn't convenient for me to actually take action on those work emails. And so I removed that from my phone. So the first thing that I do when I log in is I go into my email and I take a look at.

Is there anything time sensitive that I need to respond to? Maybe there's a question from a team member or a client needed something, or is there something that needs my attention sooner rather than later? So I address those things first. And then what I do is I look ahead to my schedule for the day. And if there are any meetings, I go ahead and I gather any information that I need.

and basically outline an agenda for that meeting and that conversation that I'm going to be having. So that is the first thing that I do. I would say that probably takes me about 30 to 45 minutes, but it gives me a sense of what's happening and where I'm headed for the day. Now, after I check my email, I go ahead and use an app called Boomerang. It's free.

I think you can use it with Outlook. I use it with Google Workspace or Gmail. I believe that you can use Boomerang with a variety of email systems. But what Boomerang does is it pauses my inbox so that until I manually unpause it, it stops bringing new emails in. And so what that allows me to do is still be able to send emails, like if I'm working on some other things or I have things that I need to send to other people on my team.

I'm able to do that. However, I don't have the distraction of new things popping up. And that's really, really helpful for me in staying focused on other things that I need to do throughout the day. So I highly recommend designating a time in the morning to dive into email. And then I would determine how many email checks you need throughout the day. Maybe you need another one halfway through the day, depending on kind of the volume.

and the time sensitive nature of the types of emails that you have. And then definitely plan some additional time, like I said, probably half hour, 45 minutes. I like to spend at the end of my day really clearing out that inbox so that things stay under control. If my inbox is out of control and disorganized, I feel very, very scatterbrained. I find that to be the case with a lot of my clients where they just, they go in and they don't even know where to turn. And so I like to have that time.

at the end of my day where I can just wrap up any outstanding tasks, respond to emails that need to be responded to, and basically be well set up for a productive next day. Okay, step number two, consolidate your availability for meetings as much as possible. Now, as I've shared with you, I have a business coach, and one of the first things that we worked on together was a...

review of the way that I was spending my time, which was very interesting for me because I feel like I do a lot of studying in terms of time management and effectiveness. And so to have this outside perspective from somebody else was a very interesting exercise for me to go through. And one of the first things when I turned in my time log to her, I tracked my time for two weeks, sent that into her and she said,

you know, there's a lot of switching back and forth. There's a lot of changing gears throughout your day. And I said, well, what do you mean? And she said, you have a meeting here and then a little work time and you have a meeting there and a little more work time. And you know, that's just kind of the way that your week looks. And she's like, that's a lot of mental shifting back and forth. And I think that we can structure your time a little bit differently. Now, part of the reason why that,

became the case was that I was making an effort to be as available as I possibly could for my clients, my team members, and also potential clients as well. I use a system called Calendly, you may have heard of that, to allow people to book meetings on my calendar. And I wanted to provide as much availability as I could because I did not want to risk losing out on an opportunity or missing out on a conversation.

simply because there weren't enough open time slots in my calendar. Now that was something that I had in my head. Does it make it true? Maybe not. But what I ended up doing with the guidance of my coach is to consolidate my meeting times. And so when I think about my week, just sharing some examples again with me personally,

I do not book meetings. I do not have openings for meetings on Monday. Mondays are my time to work on some business development, meet with my assistant to take a look at the week ahead, do some accounting and finance look, even if it's work just to, it might be some actual work in that area, or it might be just doing a review of where numbers are at, things like that. But I do spend some focused time looking at,

our accounting and finance and our numbers on Mondays, I am not client facing on Mondays. Not usually. There are exceptions and you can certainly make exceptions as you need to. But then I focus the bulk of my meetings either on Tuesday mornings, Wednesday afternoons, or Thursday mornings. Fridays are kind of my catch all day where I might reserve some time in the morning to just wrap things up so that when I log out on Friday,

I can breathe easily and enjoy my weekend, not feeling like the work is spiraling out of control without me. So that's just a little bit about the way that I personally structure my meetings. I have some clients that I've worked with where they are in meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Those are their primary meeting days. Just to give you an example, here's another thought. Actually, that's kind of interesting. Another one of my clients,

who is very client -facing in the industry that she's in. She's regularly meeting with clients and that's a very important part of the work that she does. She has what she calls a flex week where the last week of every month, that whole entire week, Monday through Friday, is blocked for no client appointments. And that is her time to work on moving the business forward, maybe wrapping up some projects, focusing on some new projects, things like that.

but that is the way that she has given herself some time to work on the business and not just in it. So just sharing some tactics with meetings. But really your goal is to give yourself larger windows of uninterrupted time. So take a look at when tends to be the most popular times throughout the course of your week that you are meeting with people. What seems to work best?

Maybe you have a networking group that you are part of that meets on Tuesday mornings, and then you just want to leave that whole day open and call that your meeting day and consolidate as much as you can. And then maybe on Wednesday, you have a good portion of the day blocked off just to get caught up on some admin and things that need to be done since you were in meetings all day on Tuesday. You get the idea. But I always have the disclaimer too, that if somebody

It tries to book a meeting with me and they're just not available during those times that I have designated for meetings. I'm happy to make an exception, but rarely does that actually happen. Usually people are just able to find a time that works for them. I no longer feel like I have to have every window of my availability available in order for somebody to book a call with me. That just was something that made it really difficult for me to mentally shift gears.

all day every day. Okay. Step number three is to determine your needle movers and reserve time for them in the open spaces on your calendar. So if you think about your calendar, we've talked about blocking off some times for checking emails, maybe doing some prep time, maybe some daily wrap up time, closing out the inbox for the day. We talked about figuring out when are the times that I want to have meetings.

When am I naturally having regular recurring meetings now? How can I build in more time for meetings around those things so that I can consolidate the time that I'm available for meetings? So when we look at what is all the open time left, here's what we're gonna do with it. And if you haven't already, highly recommend downloading my priority planner, which will help you walk through.

where you need to be prioritizing your time in terms of the tasks and the things that are on your plate. I will have a link to that in the show notes in this episode. But one of the top tier things on the priority planner is a category called things that generate new business soon. And these things are things like sales, maybe doing joint ventures with other complimentary businesses that work with

Similar clientele as you, but offer different services. Maybe it's having meetings with referral partnerships, things like that. That is generate new business soon, just to give you some ideas here. Another category, which is kind of below that in terms of priority, is the things that generate new business in the future. So this might be meeting with your marketing team or working on some new content creation.

developing additional revenue streams might be in that, where it's not necessarily something that's going to generate new business sooner than later, but it's going to be something in the future that you're working towards, if that makes sense. Some other things that you might want to think about when you look at the open spots on your calendar are other big picture projects and incentives that you're working on. So as I shared, we want to make sure that we're blocking in times of the day,

where we are focusing on email, and then we're going to be focusing on looking at how do we consolidate meetings so that we're not switching gears all the time, all day, every day. And then when we look at what that leaves us with open space, we wanna be designating time for the things that are most important to us in getting the results that we want. And that's really the quick three -step guide.

to time blocking your calendar. So as far as your next steps go, is I recommend adding these blocks to your calendar, block off time for each of the things that we talked about. However, a tip here would be to keep the designating meeting times on your calendar unblocked if you're using a scheduling tool such as, you know, Calendly, Acuity, because if you have something blocked in, if you block off, it says meeting time and...

the way that most systems are set up, it's looking at is there a conflict on your calendar? It might not be picking that up. And so I recommend leaving that open so that you can clearly see this is time that I have available to make appointments and have conversations with other people. Just wanted to mention that next step here. So thank you so much for hanging in there with me today. I hope that this was helpful for you.

and that we were really able to distill this down into the key components of time blocking. And I hope that that was helpful for you. Please follow and subscribe so that you never miss an episode where you'll learn more strategies to grow and scale your business in a way that is authentic and aligned for you. I appreciate you listening today and I will see you in the next episode.